CoffeeBear.net

Project: Refinish The CoffeeTable

Posted by Mark | Filed under WoodWorking

In a time long ago, when Ariesna was first mov­ing in with me, we pur­chased a pine cof­feetable at a garage sale for ~$25¹. It was noth­ing spe­cial, just some­thing that we knew would serve as a place to rest our feet on from the couch and a spot to drop some books. When we bought it; we didn’t really care for the fin­ish on it and said we’d redo it one of these days. About seven years later, Mam­abear started mak­ing com­ments about mov­ing back to Michi­gan; I knew I’d bet­ter get off my duff and get the table redone while I still had a friendly garage to do it in. Since this was Memo­r­ial day week­end; I fig­ured it was the per­fect time to tackle this sum­mer project. I intended from the start to doc­u­ment this project, but got a bit excited about doing this myself and for­got to take pic­tures of the table before I started. Prior to begin­ning the project, the fin­ish on the table com­pletely obscured the wood grain and was an olive-tan color. Def­i­nitely an ugly beast.

Sat­ur­day, we got up and went over to our local Lowe’s store to pick up some needed sup­plies. Before I go into any fur­ther details on this project; I’m going to remind you to read and fol­low all the safety instruc­tions from the man­u­fac­turer on what­ever chem­i­cals or tools that you use when doing this sort of thing. Some of the stuff used can be extremely dan­ger­ous if mis­han­dled!

Back to the project, at Lowe’s we picked up²:

• AO Safety Chem­i­cal Splash/Impact Gog­gle: With a bit of adjust­ment to the head­band, these gog­gles fit snug­gly and com­fort­able. When I wore them with my con­tacts in; I had no prob­lems but I found while wear­ing my glasses, the gog­gles got steamed up quickly which could be prob­lem­atic. When I bought these gog­gles; Lowes had it in a set with a dust mask and a set of ear plugs for slightly more money. That’s some­thing one should def­i­nitely con­sider if they’re going to do a lot of work­ing with powertools.
• 8 Pack of 3023–01 LG STRIPPER GLOVE: These gloves are designed to pro­tect your hands while strip­ping wood. I found the cot­ton lin­ing just absorbed my sweat mak­ing wear­ing the gloves later a nasty expe­ri­ence. Also, Lowes only had them in large when I picked up a pair and I found the size to be on the small side; given that you’re going to be wear­ing the gloves for sev­eral hours, try to plan for size dis­crep­an­cies and get a pair that will com­fort­ably fit you.
• Cit­ristrip: Cit­rus Foam Spray (paint/varnish remover)
• Min­wax Poly­shades Old Maple Satin: Ariesna & I knew we wanted a darker color to our table. I knew that I wanted the table done this week­end, so I picked Minwax’s Poly­shade Stain & Fin­ish. Then we set­tled on the Old Maple Satin fin­ish. For our table, we only bought 1 can (the 1 quart size) and I used about a third of it.
• Woost­ers Polyurethane Brush (3″ Pro White China Bristle):
• Steel Wool: I bought a bun­dle pack­age with sev­eral pieces with var­i­ous lev­els of coarse­ness. I mostly got it for the very fine steel wool as most the web­sites I’d checked in my research­ing for this project rec­om­mended using it between coats of the polyurethane finish.
• Sand­pa­per, super-fine (220 grade)
• Klean-Strip’s Odor­less Min­eral Spir­its: I picked this up for clean­ing up after I was done with the table.

As we were walk­ing to check­out, Ariesna asked me if I thought the table was going to be worth all this. I told her to con­sider what a new cof­feetable would cost and she let the argu­ment drop. Then we headed over to Mamabear’s house with the table and our supplies.

I put on an apron, my gog­gles, my gloves and the dust mask³. Then I care­fully read the direc­tions for the Cit­ristrip, shook the can and sprayed down the table. I was sur­prised at how nice the strip­per smelt. It was a very pow­er­ful orange scent, but no whiff of any harsh chem­i­cals. You can stand a good, cou­ple feet away from the item you’re spray­ing and still hit it. Though I did find that keep­ing the can within 12–18 inches resulted in bet­ter cov­er­age of the area I was spray­ing. Also, since the spray foams up, it stuck to the legs very nicely. After you spray the wood down, Cit­ristrip rec­om­mends that you leave it on the wood for at least 30 min­utes but does say you can leave it on for upto 24 hours. We had some other errands to run and ended up leav­ing it on for ~90 min­utes. Then I came back, suited up (only the gloves & apron this time) and started scrap­ing off the foam & the old fin­ish. I found that the major­ity of the fin­ish slid off like but­ter on a hot knife (see Fig­ure 002).

After I scraped the table com­pletely down; I did notice some areas still had fin­ish on them and I started to try remov­ing it with the steel wool and sand­pa­per, but that was con­sid­er­able more phys­i­cal effort than I wanted to expend. Also, I still had some Cit­ristrip left over; so I started to spray down the table again. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t have enough to com­plete over the table a 2nd time. Espe­cially since I was mak­ing sure to lay down a much thicker coat of the spray this time; so I left about half the table top uncoated and went back to Lowe’s for a 2nd can. When I got back; I com­pleted spray­ing down the table and let it sit for a cou­ple more hours.

The plas­tic putty knife worked great for remov­ing the spray & fin­ish from the table­top but wasn’t so good at curved sur­faces like the legs. I found that a wet rag (in my case, an old towel) worked really well on the legs. I was also pleased to see that the table had some inter­est­ing wood grain; once I’d got­ten rid of the old fin­ish. Once the old fin­ish had been com­pletely removed; I knew I’d made a good choice to do this as the table already looked 100% improved. I gave the entire table a com­plete rub­down with a wet towel to make sure I’d removed all the cit­ristrip and the old fin­ish. Then I let the table dry over night.

The next morn­ing, I got up early (for me, on a week­end) came over to the table gave it a light sand­ing and a quick rub­down with a damp (but not soak­ing wet towel), let it dry for a few min­utes and the started to lay down the first coat of the fin­ish that we’d picked out. I prob­a­bly could have put on just a clear coat of polyurethane but Ariesna & I are fans of the red/cherry-like fin­ishes. Once com­pleted, I real­ized a cou­ple of mis­takes that I’d made with the first coat:

• I didn’t stir the fin­ish as well as I’d ini­tially thought. So when I was work­ing to get the color I wanted; I kept paint­ing on more & more fin­ish. All that excess fin­ish caused some runs in the fin­ish and the color wasn’t very even.
• I didn’t get down on the ground enough to look at the under­side of table to see how much cov­er­age I was get­ting on the lip and the edges of the tabletop.
• I tended to use short, fast strokes to lay down the finis; but to avoid bub­bles, you need to use long, slow strokes.⁴

I did try to do what I could to cor­rect these prob­lems in the 2nd and final coat. I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful in clean­ing up the legs but the table­top does look excel­lent to my eyes. Even the sides of the table aren’t too bad, though they are far from per­fect. Over­all, I’d give myself a 3.5/5 points for the qual­ity of the work I did, but then I’m prob­a­bly being a bit kind on myself since I’ve not done any­thing like this since 7th grade shop class, more than a dozen years ago. Then again the new fin­ish being such a vast improve­ment over the old one could also be influ­enc­ing my perception.

¹ She says it was $25. I remem­ber it being $15, but I also know bet­ter than to argue with my wife too much. :)
² Addi­tion­ally, you’ll want to have some sort of tarp on the ground to keep the chem­i­cals from get­ting all over your floor and some rags handy for clean-up (among other things). I was for­tu­nate enough to get mar­ried recently and we got a num­ber of new tow­els & sheets as wed­ding presents; so I had plenty of mate­r­ial handy for rags and a tarp. Also, Mam­abear sup­plied me some old news­pa­pers; which were use­ful to wipe the stripper/finish-sludge off of my putty knife and a good place to set down the can of fin­ish while I was work­ing on dif­fer­ent parts of the table.
³ Chem­i­cal fumes tend to make me nau­seous quickly, so I fig­ured I’d try wear­ing this to see if it would help. As it turns out, I didn’t need the mask at all. See above for details.
⁴ I was in a bit of a hurry to meet some friends for cof­fee that morn­ing and was run­ning a bit behind schedule.

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